meta-analyses

Definitions

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n. Plural form of meta-analysis.

Etymologies

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Examples

A group of researchers at the City University of New York and Kingston University in London performed two meta-analyses, which is a way of statistically combining studies to quantify the overall result.

Robert Superko , chief medical officer of Quest Diagnostics Inc.'s Celera business unit, which offers the test, said in a statement, "While we have not had a chance to review the present study in full, we caution that meta-analyses tend to obscure the benefits for the individual patient or even for subsets of patients."

The study also looked at 10 other meta-analyses of mammography in women under 50, which included pooled results from some of the nine studies, and noted that four reported a significant reduction in breast-cancer mortality.

In 2005, the psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde of the University of Wisconsin–Madison reviewed forty-six meta-analyses sort of a meta-analysis of the meta-analyses of studies looking at the difference between men and women in a range of traits that included mathematical and verbal aptitude, executive functioning, the tendency toward self-disclosure, helping behavior, self-esteem, and moral reasoning.

But if meta-analyses of sex differences in other psychological, emotional, and cognitive functions are an indication, much of what we assume to be a significant difference between the sexes is largely inflated.

Consider telepathy: I've grown so used to reading articles in which skeptics proclaim there is no firm evidence for telepathy that I was stunned by what I found: Parapsychology has in fact yielded hundreds upon hundreds of studies and meta-analyses demonstrating some small telepathy effect in the general population.